- Maths reviewed by Josh Miller
- Tested by Diana Westfield
A same race multi calculator for the bet Australian bookmakers have made a Saturday staple: several legs from one race rolled into a single price. Horse A to win, horse B to run top two, horse C top four. The CasinoCalcs SRM calculator shows the return on your stake, what the separate leg prices multiply to, and how far the quoted SRM price sits from that. With legs at 3.50, 1.90 and 1.40 the straight multiply is 9.31; if you’re offered 8.00, the bookmaker has trimmed about 14%.
SRM calculator: why the legs don’t simply multiply
In an ordinary multi the legs come from different races, so multiplying the prices is fair. In a same race multi they share a finishing order. If your winner wins, it can’t also run second, and every place it takes is a place your other horses can’t. Sometimes that helps the combination and sometimes it hurts it, and bookmakers price that in with their own model. So the multiplied figure isn’t “the right price”, it’s a sanity check: a quote well below it means a big margin on top of the correlation.
If you want an honest joint chance, run the race through the horse race predictor. It simulates the whole finishing order thousands of times from the win odds, so you can see how often your exact combination actually happens.
Picking legs that make sense
The legs that add the most price for the least risk tend to be a placing on a horse that’s short in the win market but rarely finishes out of the first four. The legs that hurt are two horses from the same stable or the same running style, where one doing well often means the other doesn’t. Keep it to two or three legs and the price stays sensible; four-leg SRMs look tempting at 20.00 but have a lot of ways to fail.
For exotic bets on the finishing order itself, the First Four calculator and the trifecta calculator work out combinations and flexi percentages, and the quaddie calculator covers four races in a row.
Bet with money you’re happy to lose on one race. BeGambleAware.org has free support, and in Australia Gambling Help Online is there 24/7.